Tag: Ghost

Merriam- Webster: Divination: the art or practice that seeks to foresee or foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge usually by the interpretation of omens or by the aid of supernatural powers. 2 : unusual insight : intuitive perception.

Counselling: the provision of professional assistance and guidance in resolving personal or psychological problems. “bereavement counselling”

Depending on the reader, it may be either or both. There are Tarot Counsellors who specialise in taking a counselling approach, often based on Jungian training. These readers may not handle the psychic challenges of divination and forecasting. Other readers, working the psychic approach, may offer valuable, sensible advice but without a basis in formal counselling.

In preparing for a reading, Tarot, runes, cards etc; the agile reader can only prepare to respond. The person will wish for verifiable feedback, or how else can they see if you know your stuff? They will want feedback, advice, prediction, hard, workable information, or they may be fragile or tired, looking for a bit of hope and cheer. But it has to be credible, to them, in the form that it takes, and spouting la- la is cheating and it ain’t going to cut it, nor does it deserve to.

You must take your cue from the cards or runes or whatever is your oracle of work. That’s what you learned it for and what you have presented at the point of sale or service. It isn’t about you.

Questions will often be presented as entirely hard boiled, to do with money or business outcomes. The client may want a yes or no answer; is this merger going ahead, will I win or lose this court case, if I spent 50 K on building this extension to my premises will I get that money back when I want to sell?

Time will tell whether you get it right, and you better had, far more often than you get it wrong, or you won’t be doing this work for long. But nothing is ever entirely factual and hard boiled. Wherever time, thought, worry, hope and effort is invested, there are high emotional stakes.

There are also those questions where the only validation possible is in the heart and mind of the other person and whether or not your answer finds resonance within them.

Here’s a recent (disguised) example from a social media forum, readings done free of charge.

Questioner. ‘Help me please? Is there a spirit of a unborn child surrounding me? Here are the cards I drew.’

Responder 1: A better question would be asking such spirits who they are to get your answer.

Responder 2 : Ask them who they are!! I have 4 guides and they always come in 2’s. Never by themselves.

Responder 3: Katie-Ellen: I don’t think so, not in a literal sense, but I see mourning. The Fool card represents the unborn. Is this why you are asking? Are you grieving a lost baby?

Questioner: Yes, and my other children seem highly attracted to my tummy all of a sudden and clingy. Its weird.

Katie-Ellen: I am so sorry. It is a grief like nothing else. But no, I think based on your cards here, The Fool card especially, says the little one’s returned to source, held safely again in the palm of the Universe, or God, whatever you like to call it. The Tower and the 9 Swords, I see as reflections of you, your own shock and sorrow. You would not want baby stuck and trapped at your side, being a soul too small to know why. You can make a shrine inside yourself, in your heart, with a candle there to light the way back to life one day for that little soul, and in that way, you can be the baby’s very own guardian angel for all time.

Questioner: I love that idea! But why do my children keep wanting to touch my tummy?

Katie-Ellen Maybe it’s like an echo location. Your children are responding to your grief and they feel the source of it. They’re wishing to comfort you and wanting to be reassured themselves that everything’s all right.

Questioner: So not a ghost then?

Katie-Ellen: I’d say the baby is gone to source again safe and sound, and the ghost now is the memory and the aftermath of loss. Your body may feel like a haunted place for the time being, not because the spirit of the baby is there but because mind and body are one. But it’s not for me or anyone to say for sure. The one card in the Tarot most suggestive of a ghost…as in an active, ongoing haunting is The Moon card. It’s absent here and a card is most conspicuous by its absence.

Questioner: That’s such a weight off my mind, I can’t begin to tell you.

This was not about divination as such. It was non- factual and non-verifiable. But was it counselling? I’ve done some of that training. Maybe I do use it unconsciously sometimes.

The first two respondents replied straightaway with what looked like their own agendas, their philosophy, and in doing so, bypassed the cards altogether not seeing the story staring them in the face, while my response, whether ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – meaningless terms here – at least started and finished with the cards- not drawn by me, these were the questioner’s own cards- so that I acted simply as a translator and messenger for the oracle. There are facts, there are truths and there are poetic truths.

The Tarot card that might be talking about things going bump in the night, and we don’t mean burglars, or …well, you know…is The Moon card: Its meanings: Dreams, Illusions, Shadows, Psychic Perception, Deceit, Danger, Fear of the Unknown, Paranoia.

Things that go bump in the night. If it’s filmable, if it’s reproducable, I don’t think it’s the real/unreal thing.

Why? Because such experiences are perceptions of the Amygdala. The eyes see what the brain sees, projecting, not reflecting. This is the vision of the psychic eye. It does not mean that it is not ‘real’.

Reports of ghosts may be considered suspect for a number of reasons. For one thing, they can be good for business…certain businesses. There was an interesting legal situation in the ’90s when a famously haunted Lancashire property, Chingle Hall, was sold at a value to reflect its haunted status with tourist income potential, which did not, em, materialise as substantially as expected.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t ghosts anywhere, anytime, ye who cry scorn and derision. It’s something so easy to do, just dismiss it, if it hasn’t happened to you. Ghosts are not performing seals, or maybe it requires a certain kind of sensitivity to be open to that perception. Which begs the question, what is a ghost, anyway?

Have I experienced anything of that sort, myself? Yes, I have, on a few occasions. The first occasion was long before I ever thought of learning Tarot, and it was extraordinary although the full strangeness did not hit me right away or even for some years. I was ‘fetched’ to a scene where a man had just died, and it turned out to have been the man himself who had done the fetching. There was the body, round the back of M&S in Leicester, there was the ambulance, and the paramedics, trying to resuscitate him, but he was now too far outside himself, and very shocked at its suddenness, poor man.

These days, there’s a small dog on the staircase just now and then. I’ve seen it running down, fading in and out of view. Nothing unpleasant whatsoever. I’ve seen it in the kitchen and on the landing, and I’ve seen it run under the dining table. It’s the size of a large terrier with pricked ears and a short dark coat. I see the movement and the shape, not the detail.

I imagine it’s some kind of energy residue; a print or a memory of a previous household pet.

Other things over the years have been sadder, stranger, creepier, and I have definitely not wished to encourage them.

I’m not asking if you ‘believe’ in such. If you don’t, you don’t, and many don’t. I get that. But, I have heard a lot of stories, presented quite matter of factly, by people in perfect possession of all their marbles. If you are interested, look up the books of TC Lethbridge, psychic researcher and academic with a scientific background. He said, ‘today’s magic is tomorrow’s science,’ and I think he’s near the mark.

The world is not only stranger than we know. It may be stranger than we CAN know. Why should recognising possibilities and the limits of current understanding be a barrier to enquiry?

Tarot, Runes, our dreams, myths and songs, are some of the many boats available for exploring these deep waters. Some may prefer to stay in harbour, and not explore at all, and that’s fine; they needn’t. But not everyone has the choice, the current pulls them out. I chose Tarot but I didn’t choose the things that went before, I learned they were part of my make-up. For all our intellectual achievements and aspirations, resistant to ‘superstition’ or not ‘we’ remain an instinctive animal. We rely on it for our safety. If someone gives you the creeps, then they give you the creeps, and there’ll be a reason. Police, Emergency Services Personnel, the Military, all need good instincts, or else.

To be psychic is only an extreme form of instinct. This is our nature and our default. Factual truth may also be poetic. Stories come from someone’s experience, and myths and fairy tales from a collective experience. In this sense, however fanciful, even ghost stories contain some essential truth. They do not lie.